By Abdel-Azim Hammad Less than 48 hours after the signing of the Wye Plantation memorandum between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, I was invited, along with two other Egyptian journalists, to meet Daniel Kurtzer, the US ambassador in Cairo. Our meeting, which lasted two hours, naturally focused on the implications of the agreement. After this meeting, the ambassador was scheduled to meet Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, who was to give him a message for US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, explaining, as the US ambassador told us, Egypt's assessment of the agreement and the guarantees for its success in the light of the details conveyed to Cairo by Yasser Arafat. The following day, I had a lengthy discussion of the Wye agreement with former ambassador Taher Shash, who was one of the two Egyptian diplomats asked by the Palestinians to review the draft of the Oslo Accord which later became known as the "Gaza-Jericho first" agreement, and who has been closely following the Oslo process since then. In the meetings with both Kurtzer and Shash, there was a consensus that, despite the fact that the Wye memorandum is in fact an agreement to implement a previous agreement, its political value is much greater than its practical value and, in the long run, it will work in the favour of the Palestinians. The participants in these meetings felt that the agreement constituted an important precedent. This was the first time that a Likud government accepted, albeit very reluctantly, to withdraw from a part of the West Bank, which they consider part of the Judea and Samaria of Eretz Israel, from which they had vowed never to withdraw and in which the Palestinians would never be accorded more than limited administrative self-rule. As is well known, the political ideology of the Israeli nationalist right (the Likud coalition) considers the West Bank part and parcel of Israelis' eternal birthright. Ambassador Kurtzer, who previously served in the US Embassy in Israel, said that testimony to the achievement witnessed at the Wye Plantation can be seen in the fact that, when Netanyahu's predecessor Shamir was at the helm of the Likud coalition at the time the Madrid peace conference got underway, he had vowed to spend the next ten years negotiating without giving an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians -- this according to a statement made by Shamir after leaving office. At long last, Ambassador Kurtzer said, the Likud has been forced to confront the reality they have been trying to evade for so many years, and has been compelled to discard the ideological smokescreen behind which its policy-makers have hidden for so long. Taher Shash was of a similar opinion. The Likud, he said, considers the West Bank part of Israel, but has never, at any time in its history, offered a vision of how Israel might deal with the more than a million Palestinians living in that area. The Likud neither wants to give them a form of citizenship without the right to vote, for fear of accusations of racism, nor to give them citizenship with full rights, for fear of transforming Israel into a bi-national state. In response to our question as to how central the notion of population transfer was to the ideology of Likud, Kurtzer told us that no Likud leader, with perhaps the exception of Sharon, has ever voiced the belief that the Palestinian problem could be solved in this manner. In all events, Kurtzer said, such a solution is not viable; otherwise the previous governments of Begin and Shamir would have attempted to implement it. In short, the Likud was ultimately forced to acknowledge what the Labour Party has long realised, which is that, if they want to hold on to territory, they would have to totally annex the West Bank, a solution which is unpalatable to the Likud due to the considerations mentioned above. The only option, therefore, was to come to an agreement with the Palestinians that may, ultimately, lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. By accepting the Wye Plantation memorandum, Netanyahu has conceded other points that conflict with right-wing Israeli ideology. For example, he has pledged to halt the settlement construction programme in the West Bank, a step which flies in the face of the ultra-right in Israel, whose central belief is that it is the right of any Jew to live anywhere in Judea and Samaria. He has also agreed to cede to the PNA areas of the West Bank that are now controlled jointly by Palestinian and Israeli forces. These concessions can only imply that the Wye agreement has exposed the contradictions between the Likud platform and reality. It has undermined the Likud's ability to ask the Israeli voter to sanction this platform in future elections. If, however, the Likud modifies its platform to accommodate the pledges made at Wye, its members will find that they have shifted closer to the position of the Labour Party. This, in turn, might eventually lead to the splintering of the Likud coalition into two factions, with the more moderate allying itself with the Labour Party and the more extreme faction returning to the traditional position of permanent opposition, held by the nationalist right prior to 1977. I took the opportunity of my meeting with Kurtzer to ask him whether he could confirm the rumour according to which President Clinton threatened Netanyahu that the US would recognise any state Arafat declares next May if Netanyahu refused to come to an agreement in Wye. Kurtzer answered that he could neither deny nor confirm the rumour; he could confirm, however, that Washington has not ruled out this option, since it does not want to preempt the results of the final status negotiations. The Likud took a further blow when it was forced to grant the CIA a role in supervising security arrangements in the West Bank. In making this concession, the Likud has in effect forfeited its alleged right to sovereignty over the West Bank. The Wye agreement has direct implications with regard to the transformation in the dynamics of the US role in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Observers agree that the personal involvement of the US president in the negotiations, even on subsidiary details, has constituted a major gain for the Palestinians. The US ambassador himself admitted that the "personal chemistry" between Clinton and Netanyahu was dealt yet another blow during the Wye Plantation talks, while the same cannot be said of the relationship between Clinton and Arafat. Arafat may well have won himself an ally upon whom he can depend in the White House. In a similar vein, Taher Shash said that the Wye agreement has demonstrated, yet again, that neither Israel nor the powerful American Zionist lobby can thwart a negotiating process once the US president has given it his personal backing. An assessment of the Wye Plantation Accord would not be complete without addressing the question of Israeli security demands, which the Likud has customarily used as a pretext to stall the peace process. Ambassador Kurtzer agreed with me on a significant point, saying that the Wye agreement has driven home a standard which President Clinton has spelled out clearly: Arafat is expected to commit himself 100 per cent to the fight against terrorism; but he is not expected to guarantee 100 per cent results. Who, then, is going to be the arbiter in the matter of whether or not Arafat has in fact committed himself 100 per cent to this fight? On that point, the American ambassador was very blunt: "We, the Americans, will be the arbiters." Thus, every time an operation against Israel is carried out, the US authorities in charge of supervising security arrangements will have to verify that its perpetrators did not receive a green light from the Palestinian Authority. They will make sure that opponents of the peace process are not encouraged, in any way, by Arafat or his government.
